A NightFall Editor:  First off, can you tell us a little bit about the Dakota Access Pipeline?

Anonymous Participant: The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), is owned by a Houston, Texas based corporation called Energy Transfer Partners, L.P. which created the subsidiary Dakota Access LLC that is building the pipeline. The DAPL, also known as the Bakken Pipeline, is proposed to transport 450,000 barrels of crude oil per day (which is fracked and highly volatile) from the Bakken fields of North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. The current route of the DAPL will cross over the Ogallala Aquifer (one of the largest aquifers in the world) and under the Missouri River twice (the longest river in the United States). Dakota Access has systematically failed to consult with tribes and conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

In early August, Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge announced that, along with Marathon Petroleum, it will make a significant investment in the Bakken Pipeline System, including the controversial Dakota Access pipeline. As part of their statement, Enbridge also noted that, “Upon successful closing of the transaction, Enbridge and Marathon Petroleum plan to terminate their transportation services and joint venture agreements for the Sandpiper Pipeline Project [a crude oil pipeline proposed for northern Minnesota.]”

We know that this influx of resources from Enbridge will only speed up the construction process.

NF: When and how was the Sacred Stone Camp established?

AP: The camp is at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers. This is important location for the Mandan origin story as the place where they came into the world after the great flood. Where the two waters meet, created Iŋyaŋ Wakháŋagapi Othí, spherical Sacred Stones (thus the colonizers’ term ‘Cannon Ball River’), but after the Army Corp of Engineers dredged and flooded the rivers in the 1950s, the flow has changed and Sacred Stones are no longer produced. The camp is surrounded by historic burial grounds, village grounds and Sundance sites that would be directly impacted by this pipeline. The water of the Missouri River is essential to life on the Standing Rock Reservation as well as all of the nations downstream.

On April 1st, 2016, a group of over 200 supporters, led by forty riders on horse, under the Lakota name, “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po”, which translates as “People, Stand with a Strong Heart!” left Fort Yates for a thirty mile trek to the camp located just north of Cannonball, North Dakota. They setup up tipis and a sacred fire. This camp has swelled in the past two months and has had multiple satellite camps across the river on private as well as unceded land on both sides of the river.

NF:  What is daily life like in the camp?

AP: Cooking, cleaning, gathering and chopping firewood and hanging out, especially around the campfire sharing food largely defined camp life. There are always families of all generations populating the camp. You can hear the people playing the drum, giving the camp its own heartbeat. Stories and memories are shared like water. Laughter and life are not uncommon.

The reality of the situation is that the people have been resisting the U.S. Empire and continuing genocide for so long that the drones and military surveillance flying above the camp the whole day becomes almost forgettable; like living next to a waterfall, the sound becomes a part of the landscape. We do counter-surveillance, logging the enemies movements. We can see all the pipeline construction equipment on the east side of the river.

Everyday there are prayers of resistance offered to the water, earth and ancestors. Without the water of life the camp and we would die.

NF:  How have folks at the camp mobilized to stop the pipeline thus far?  Has it been solely a publicity campaign/symbolic protest thus far or have folks directly interfered with construction of the pipeline?  Are there discussions about tactics at the camp?  Did these change after the Army Corps of Engineers approved the pipeline crossing the river and/or after the arsons affecting DAPL construction sites in Iowa?  As I see it, the camp and the arsons are complementary rather than conflicting tactics for stopping the pipeline; is this generally how people feel at the camp or is there a range of opinions on the matter?

AP: Like with any struggle, the people are not homogeneous in thought and tactic. Much of the camp’s rhetoric is of the “Non-violent Direct Action” type. Lock your arm to this piece of deconstruction equipment and take a picture with a banner for Facebook. But the Warrior Culture that is so rich in Lakota memory seems to counter a lot of the liberal, non-violent, NGO types. Comrades saw what happened in Iowa, heard about the $1,000,000 in damage and got inspired. I wouldn’t say that it was publicly celebrated because the camp’s tactic of “Non-violence” is the image they want to perpetuate. Like I said, it is a tactic… not everyone thinks that is what we need to dogmatically stick to. It is one thing to use Non-Violence as a rhetorical device in corporate media to spread your inspirational actions but it is another thing to preach it as your dogma in your private circles and use it to stop material damage to the infrastructure of ecocide. I see the former being invoked much greater than the latter.

NF:  How has the camp’s location on private land affected its character?  I would imagine the fact that it’s on private land gives it some protection against police but also means that if folks at the camp did engage in any illegal activities the land owner would be in a vulnerable position with regards to legal repression.  Is that a concern?  Does the person who owns the land have more say than others about tactics or daily matters at the camp?  What does the decision making process look like?

AP: The question of “private land” is especially difficult to address when we factor in Reservations (or what the U.S. Empire originally called and created them for, Prison of War Camps). The reservations are actually Federal Land. This means that local county and state police cannot enter it. A huge reason why Dakota Access (the company) is not building the pipeline thru the rez but literally a couple hundred meters north of it.

When the reservations were created, imperial logic of “borderization” was imposed; meaning, the communal and nomadic lands used for Life were divided by borders: fencing for animal domestication, invisible lines drawn on maps to denote “property” i.e. who owns what, etc. This fundamentally changed people’s relation to land. And this set up the infrastructure/hierarchies for surveillance and policing.

The camp exists in a way that resists this imperial imposition. We share food and water without hesitation. We have no leader. We all have knowledge to share and learn from each other. We recognize that the borders we build between ourselves are not “natural” anymore than the flooding in the 1950s by the Army Corps of Engineers is. They do not spread our Wildfire, so we continue to keep the eternal flame lit.

Instead of framing things in colonial terms of “legal/illegal”, it makes more sense at the camp to think in terms of effectiveness; effectiveness of stopping this genocidal project so the people can reclaim their Way of Life.

NF:  How can folks in the Twin Cities support the camp and keep up with what’s going on?

AP: Unicorn Riot has been doing amazing media coverage the entire duration of the camp and you can can thoroughly updated by reading and watching their media at their website search for tag: DAPL

Visit the camps offical website.

From there you can donate to the legal defense, see what supplies are needed, and more.

Lastly, come to the camp! Everybody is welcome.

[Pamphlet version]

The events of the July 9th highway shutdown were inspiring, to say the least. Those who struck back against the police state inflicted significant financial damages on the city of St. Paul and the businesses that rely on I-94, as well as injuring 21 cops. Headlines the next day juxtaposed this number with the 102 arrests made that night to imply that the violence directed against the police did not go unpunished. However, the vast majority of those arrests were either negotiated surrenders by pacifists among the highway blockaders or misdemeanor citations issued hours after the shutdown was over. As it stands now only one person is facing felony charges stemming from the shutdown. The fact that there were many more who fought back that night and got away with it shows that it is possible to put the police on the defensive without resorting to suicidal lone wolf attacks such as the recent ones in Dallas and Baton Rouge. However, one person facing felony charges is still one too many, and that number could easily have been higher had the police been only marginally more prepared. Many people engaged in a variety of risky activities without taking basic precautions to conceal their identity. While the police were temporarily driven out of the streets surrounding the highway there were still cameras present, as well as pacifist enforcers eager to impose their own tactics upon those with differing ideas of how best to oppose the police. Nekima Levy-Pounds, the influential leader of NAACP-Minneapolis, stated in a speech at the Governor’s Mansion following the shutdown that “I ain’t no snitch, but if I see you smashing things I’m running to the 5-0.” With this in mind we offer the following reflections and fashion tips for today’s security-minded rebel.

HOW

The first order of business is to cover your face. A bandana will work, but a t-shirt is better. Simply put it around your head as if you were putting it on, tie the sleeves together behind your head and pull it up to just below your eyes, covering as much as possible. Combine with a hoodie and/or stocking cap to completely cover your face. Another important point is that the more similarly-dressed people there are, the harder it tends to be for police to get charges to stick to any one of them. For this reason black is the preferred color for masks and protest-wear in general, as it is one of the most common clothing colors and it makes us look fabulous. Beyond the mask it is best to stick with plain clothes that can’t be easily tied to your everyday style, such as a simple hoodie and jeans combo. If something could be used to identify you, cover it up or leave it at home. That means tattoos, hair, shoes, bags and other distinctive accessories. Glasses are not ideal but you definitely do not want to have contacts in if the cops bring out pepper spray or tear gas, so wear them if you need them and ditch them if you can manage.

In addition to having your all-black ensemble ready to go, you will generally want to wear something inconspicuous when entering and exiting areas of conflict. Avoid changing in sight of cops, cameras and people you don’t know or trust. A change of clothes is also crucial in case the cops start shooting marker rounds, little pellets that hurt like hell and leave a colored stain wherever they hit. If you are tagged by one of these, ditch the marked clothes as soon as possible, as police use marker rounds in situations where they have lost control, tagging individuals to send snatch squads after once control has been reimposed. In fact, much of the state’s case against the person facing felony charges from the night of the 9th appears to rest on the fact that when they were picked up they were allegedly sporting a tag from a round fired earlier in the night. It might suck to ditch your favorite pair of jeans, but a new pair will be cheaper than a court case.

WHY

There are many reasons you might choose to maintain anonymity at protests and other moments of rupture, the most obvious being that many effective methods of resisting the brutalities of this world, from white supremacy to patriarchy to the destruction of the earth, fall outside the boundaries of acceptable protest as defined by cops, politicians and respectable citizens. Actions such as defending oneself from the police, attacking the assets of white supremacist collaborators such as the private prison-funding Wells Fargo and expropriating the physical manifestations of the life stolen from us at work (aka looting) all carry with them the possibility of repression and are therefore best done as anonymously as possible. However, there are many other reasons you might choose to mask up. Even if, for whatever reason, you do not personally engage in confrontational actions masking up can respect and protect the autonomy of those who do. As we said before, the more masked people there are the safer are those who are most likely to be targeted by the police. Or maybe you don’t come to the protest expecting to engage in any risky behavior but are overtaken by the course of events, as happens in unpredictable situations. If you see a cop trying to drag one of your friends away and have the opportunity to snatch them back, you will be happy you masked up. And beyond your feelings on whether or not outright confrontation with the cops is tactically sound in our current moment, the long history of state repression in this country demonstrates pretty conclusively that the state will mobilize all of its power to crush any movement, peaceful or not, that poses a real threat to its hegemony. You can be sure that the police were filming the night of the 9th, in addition to monitoring the feeds of those livestreaming; those who did not have their faces covered are now that much more likely to have attention paid to them in the future.

A word or two should also be said about white supremacists. Much has been made of the fact that the white supremacists who shot five protestors outside the 4th Precinct in Minneapolis last year were wearing masks. Respectability-obsessed activists have manipulated people’s legitimate concerns about another white supremacist attack to pressure anyone wearing a mask, regardless of their political position or their perceived race, into removing it, thus consolidating their control over spaces of potential rupture. What has been completely overlooked in the discussion of this incident is the fact that in addition to wearing masks the white supremacists were filming everyone at the camp. These creeps have shown a pattern of harassment against known anti-racists both online and in real life, as evidenced by the death threats received by the individual who originally sounded the alarm that white supremacists were using 4chan to plan an assault on the occupation. They used their camera as a weapon much like the gun they would shoot soon after. Clearly this is a conversation that should be happening before we are on the streets confronting the police and the racists, but in our opinion the existence of white supremacists is another reason to wear a mask, not a reason to expose yourself. Perhaps in this sense these white supremacists were being more realistic than our side; they recognized that this is a conflict between two irreconcilable forms of life and took steps to protect themselves accordingly. It’s time we do the same.

With the conventions over and election season moving right along, we’ve seen a renewed urgency around the imperative to make sure that anyone except Donald Trump is elected. Trump’s presidency is presented to us as a doomsday scenario that must be avoided at all costs, even if that cost is voting for someone like Hillary Clinton. Yet the fact is that Clinton’s policies are Trump’s with a softer touch. There is no alternative in electoral politics – whether Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein.

There are two differences between Trump and other politicians which make his campaign remarkable. The first is that he is blunt about his oppressive positions: making blatantly racist calls for deportations while Hillary attempts to sell her immigration policies as “humanitarian,” despite the fact that they will still lead to a similarly massive amount of attacks on migrants, just as Obama’s policies have. Let’s not forget that Obama has deported 2.5 million people, more than any president before him. Trump is simply the most flagrant of the candidates; in reality they all share an interest in the perseverance of the status quo.

The second difference is that Trump’s campaign has mobilized disparate organizations on the far-right and given them space to recruit and build. Militia groups have been prominent at Trump rallies and the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party was spotted at his campaign events early on. At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland countless different far-right groups were present. We’ve already seen how this campaign has encouraged the far-right in terms of public organizing; the KKK have attempted two high-profile rallies this year in Anaheim and Stone Mountain, while the Traditionalist Worker’s Party organized what was supposed to be a pro-Trump demonstration in Sacramento. All of these and more were fiercely confronted by anti-fascists, although some ended with serious injuries.

If we’re being honest, there’s nothing we can do to stop the election of a president who will continue to oppress us. We should focus on what we can do: prepare for the potential of escalating conflict with far-right movements. How would white supremacist groups react to Trump’s victory in November? To his loss? What if the loss is narrow, or a landslide? Victory celebrations could become roving mobs attacking people perceived to be of marginalized identities. As far fetched as this may seem, it’s already a reality in Europe where the far-right has capitalized on the refugee crisis to expand it’s power, in addition to the historical precedent of lynch mobs in the United States. Maybe the reality of a Trump presidency that can’t deliver on his promises will lead to a depression of right-wing organizing as happens on the left every time a Democrat wins. Maybe a landslide loss will bring many who previously held faith in the electoral system into the fold of militant fascist groups.

The point is that these are the material scenarios to explore and more importantly, prepare for. Preparation can include anti-fascist propaganda, self defense training (hand to hand, bladed, and armed), building and strengthening ties with friends and accomplices, keeping tabs on right-wing activity and confronting it when the opportunity arises. Nothing could be worse than facing a trained enemy after wasting months registering voters to defeat Trump. There are no solutions in the democratic system, it’s time to leave politics behind and confront domination where it exists: it’s material manifestations in our daily lives.

This will not begin nor end on election day. These confrontations are ongoing, flaring up during large battles at white nationalist demonstrations and Trump rallies. To stomp out fascism, we must be persistent in denying the far-right a platform, denying them a voice, denying them the ability to feel safe whenever they leave their house. The convergences against white supremacist demonstrations, the attacks on Donald Trump supporters at his events, the waves of anti-racist vandalism, these and more all coalesce as hostile conditions for our enemies. What we’ve seen so far is inspiring, from Sacramento to Chicago to here at home, but we need to get ready to step things up a notch.